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Hangman With a Heart
Was Phil Hanna an angel of mercy or just another cog in the machinery of state-sponsored death?
ON DECEMBER 5, 1896, a wealthy 22-year-old Epworth, Illinois farmer and landowner named G. Phil Hanna witnessed the hanging of Fred Behme, who had been convicted and sentenced to die in McLeansboro for the murders of his wife and infant son. Hanna claimed to have been “mortified” by the “brutal, horrifying” hanging, which he claimed an inexperienced executioner botched. On his way home, he decided to make it his life’s work to devise a more efficient and humane way to hang those sentenced to death.
Curiously, news accounts of the Behme hanging report that the execution was not botched at all, but went perfectly. “Behme’s death was almost instantaneous and he scarcely made a struggle,” the De Kalb Daily Chronicle reported. The Chicago Chronicle and the Champaign Daily News also reported the hanging as uneventful, with death immediate.
Behme did have an unusually thick neck, “almost as large as his head,” according to the McLeansboro Leader, but still “examining physicians had ruled his death had been instantaneous.”
Something, however, made Phil Hanna want to become America’s prominent expert on hanging. After the Behme hanging, he bought his own ropes (a four-ply, long-fiber…
